Cornell: Sites Will Be Upgraded for Disabled

After rejecting policy in 2009, University affirms commitment to disabled

Until he found a way to circumvent blocks of irrelevant text, Zachary Mason ’12, a blind student and Sun science writer, needed as long as 5 to 10 minutes to read a single e-mail on his CMail account, “just to find what the e-mail was telling me, who sent it and what was involved.”

Mason said he uses the program Jobs Access With Speech to transform a website’s images and text into an input he can understand. Yet the ease with which Mason uses JAWS depends on the programming of the website he is trying to access, and Mason called CMail’s internal framework “miserable.”